The story of a French high-school girl who embarks on a torrid affair with a woman painter, Blue Is The Warmest Color is a hypnotically well-made and affecting movie with a meretricious streak a mile wide. What’s tricky is that the meretriciousness may be unavoidable—that is, it&#x2019;s built into the subject matter—and the real question is how much or how little it’s going to bug you. But honest, guys: It ought to bug you at least a little, no matter how keeno you’ll feel when you get to say, "But honey, this thing won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival!" as two ridiculously gorgeous young actresses have intense and mighty unsimulated-looking sex on-screen—not just once, but again and again, and for tick-tick-ticking minutes at a time.

Making all this even more—gee, what’s the right word?—problematic is that Blue’s heroine is 17 when the movie starts and the actress playing her looks it. (For the record, the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, is male—although the creator of the comic Blue is based on, Julie Maroh, isn’t.) When we first meet Adele (Ad&#xE8;le Exarchopoulos), she’s just another drab, honey-haired, ridiculously gorgeous adolescent who likes hanging out with her trash-talking, ridiculously gorgeous gal pals and figures boys must be what she’s into. (This is what we call Internalized Peer Pressure at work.) She’s out with one and hasn’t quite caught on that he doesn’t interest her when punky, blue-haired, ridiculously gorgeous Emma (Léa Seydoux) saunters by, laughing and snuggling with her girlfriend as if there’s nothing closer to bliss on this earth. And from now on, the wistful look in Adele’s eyes tells us, she won’t be able to fool herself that it didn’t look like bliss to her.

If I sound like I’m being a tad sarcastic, it’s because this set-up could just as easily belong to the kind of porn flick where someone kicks off the orgy sequence by saying, "Well, we all know what we’re here for." A big chunk of the audience for Blue Is The Warmest Color will undoubtedly say the same thing. But that’s unfair to the best stuff in the movie, because Kechiche has a genuine knack not only for drawing us inside Adele’s troubled emotions and dawning desires but for keeping everybody else’s moment-to-moment behavior convincingly human. I mean, he really pays attention: If you were told the movie was the work of an observant and sensitive female director—Sofia Coppola, say—odds are you’d believe it. Well, if the nude scenes got snipped out, anyhow—and maybe even if they weren’t.

The movie lasts just under three hours, but I was definitely never bored. Not just for self-evidently suspect reasons, either. Kechiche, who also co-wrote the adaptation of Maroh’s comic with Ghalia Lacroix, is at his best with long, involved, often wrenching dialogue scenes that don’t have the artificial shape of conventional screenwriting. They wander through all sorts of believably erratic emotional loops and turns, with the camera in close to catch every telltale facial flicker and unspoken thought, and usually end the way real conversations do—that is, almost by accident. Like the movie’s lovely, low-key visual palette—a lot of it looks shot in natural light, bringing a delicacy to the women’s features that’s remarkably intimate—the abundance of lifelike prattle works against the temptation to see Blue Is The Warmest Color in "We all know what we’re here for" terms. Emotionally speaking, we often don’t know at all.

Yet the naturalism can also be a cheat. When Emma and Adele encounter each other again at the gay bar Adele is tentatively visiting for the first time, the nuances of Emma’s amused interest and Adele’s tentative fumbling are awfully credible, including the instant change in tone when Emma’s knowing girlfriend shows up. But that doesn’t change the fact that the other women in the bar are an array of Alluring Lesbian Types that fetish photographer Helmut Newton wouldn’t have sneezed at—though Helmut, not a man to dissimulate about what he was here for, wouldn’t have put up with any nonsense about keeping things subtle. You can’t even say we’re seeing this garden of potential delights through Adele’s dazzled eyes, because nothing else in the movie implies that sort of subjectivity.

Once Emma and Adele start getting it on together, it’s to Kechiche ’s credit that the first of the yowza-boss sex scenes doesn’t throw us right out of the movie. We’re still conscious of emotions and personalities, not just naked bodies. Arguably, the explicitness isn’t gratuitous but essential, since the rapture of erotic awakening can’t really be celebrated via euphemism. But all the same—aw, c’mon. Because I’m not a lesbian and wishing won’t make it so, I have no way of knowing whether this intricate variety of positions, considerately arranged to give the audience a better view of what’s going on than either of the participants has, is just par for the course on a moderately inventive dame’s first night with a newbie. I do kind of doubt it, though, and even if Kechiche’s intentions are lyrical rather than prurient, we’re still being turned into voyeurs. Face it, too many ostensibly art-minded male directors have gotten their jollies out of sexing things up—the Kubrick of Eyes Wide Shut, for instance—for a man behind the camera to be especially trustworthy about this razzmatazz.

But was I still hooked and impressed a lot of the time? Yeah, I was still hooked and impressed a lot of the time. Not only are the final convolutions of the two women’s affair genuinely saddening and evocative—we’ve all been there, gay or straight—but you’ll also be able to enjoy them in peace, since anyone who showed up for the Hot Lesbo Action will have figured out it’s safe to go hit Burger King by then. As for the two lead actresses, maybe the highest compliment a straight male critic can give Seydoux and Exarchopoulos is that I know I’ll recall their faces, voices, conversational styles and psychologically revealing little tics and gestures in this movie long after gazing spellbound at their entwined nude bodies has become a faint, happy but morally dubious memory.

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